§ 1. Of the four chief elements which, in various combinations, make up living bodies, three are gaseous under all ordinary conditions and the fourth is a solid. Oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen are gases which for many years defied all attempts to liquefy them, and carbon is a solid except perhaps at the extremely high temperature of the electric arc. Only by intense pressures joined with extreme refrigerations have the three gases been reduced to the liquid form.[2] There is much significance in this. When we remember how those redistributions of Matter and Motion which constitute Evolution, structural and functional, imply motions in the units that are redistributed; we shall see a probable…
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